🚀 go-pugleaf

This is in response to your varied and miscellaneous gripes about LightspeedC. 
Before I begin responding to your specific complaints, first allow me to say 
that I am a user of LightspeedC (and to a much greater extent its sister 
product Lightspeed Pascal). It is not a perfect application. It comes damn 
close, but it's not perfect. But I have *never* seen a perfect application, on 
*any* computer.

You say that it "is one of the poorest products [you] have ever seen for a 
computer." But by comparison to what? The least you can do is tell us what 
you're used to. Or what you've found to be better.

One caveat: A main reason that I am defending LightspeedC is because I like 
the program. It is a fact (know my most of the readers of this news group) 
that I worked for THINK Technologies (the producers of LightspeedC). But I am 
answering this message as a satisfied owner and user of LightspeedC. Whether 
the reader believes this or not is of little consequence to me. I simply am 
relating the facts as they are.

Now, in response to your numbered points:

1a) "The documentation is awful." 
	The function of a program's documentation is to tell you how to use the 
program. For a programming environment, you need to know the basics: how to 
use the editor, how to use the compiler, how to use the linker, and so forth. 
I've been a user of LightspeedC since I first took up the C language, and I 
found the manual well geared towards someone who didn't know how to use the 
package. The manual does assume a certain basic amount of Macintosh knowledge, 
and a certain amount of C knowledge, but this is stated in the manual's 
introduction.

	Also, it's worth noting that Macintosh documentation is more sparse than PC 
(or other) documentation, because there's less to learn.

	An important part of using any programming language system is knowing the 
language you're trying to program in.

1b) "The library reference is incomplete, and doesn't say little things like 
which headers & libraries you must include."

	Horsefeathers. Chapter 13 of the User's Guide gives (on each page) a library 
function, along with a prototype of the function's declaration, and #include 
directives for the necessary include files.

2) "The editor sucks and you're stuck with it."

	I may be just a poor stupid Macintosh user, but I've found the editor to be 
completely serviceable. There's no limit to the size of a source file I can 
edit, and the editor is uniformly fast no matter huge the source file is. I 
have used the editor to massage a 350K BinHex file, with no problems. The 
search/replace is fast and reliable, and has pattern-matching and multi-file 
search if I want to use it. I can also use the Option, Shift, and Command keys 
if I want to pull tricks with long-distance selections and position jumps.

2a) "The editor is so bad it isn't worth mentioning."

	It's no worse than any other Macintosh-based text editor. "Good" or "Bad" is 
a matter of personal taste, at any rate.

3) "The system is extremely limited by memory constraints."

	At best, this is wrong. You can run programs of unlimited size on your 
computer, be it Mac 128K, 512K, Plus, SE, or II. The segmentation is easy and 
painless. It is true that the Macintosh imposes a global-space limitation of 
32K, but this is due to the A5-relative referencing of globals. To work around 
the limit, use pointers instead of large static arrays. This and other methods 
of getting around the limit have been discussed time and time again in this 
newsgroup.

	The 32K limitation can't be so awful -- many popular (and large!) programs 
have been written using LightspeedC; for example, Aldus PageMaker, Adobe 
Illustrator, Quark XPress, and LightspeedC itself.

4) "The system doesn't really handle Multi-Finder."

	It doesn't? If  you get an "Out of Memory" message, the next step is to see 
how to increase the memory available to LightspeedC. If you only have one 
megabyte of memory, you're screwed, but the LightspeedC update notes for 2.13 
do note that you'll need two megabytes to run all but the smallest programs. 
You can increase the allocation by choosing "Get Info" in the Finder, and 
bumping up LightspeedC's application memory size to a larger size, if you can 
afford the space. On a two-megabyte machine I use either 640 or 768K, 
depending on what else I want to have resident.

5) "The system doesn't support the 68881."

	This will change.

6) "I'm not sure how robust the compiler is." 

	I'm not a C expert, so I can't comment on your specific example. But I will 
say this: in every case I've seen where the compiler has flagged an error, and 
there's been doubt as to the robustness of the compiler, the compiler has been 
right, and I've been wrong.

7) "The error messages are useless."

	They're error messages. They give a description of the error. What else can 
you ask for? I've always found them to be helpful. Maybe a bit terse at times, 
but if I get confused, there's an appendix in the manual that gives a listing 
or each message, followed by a fairly detailed description of the possible 
causes of that error. I've never been misled by a LightspeedC error message.

7a) "The compiler stops on the first error."

	I much prefer this to a cascade of error messages. I've hated cascades since 
the day a Unix C compiler gave me 140 messages, all stemming from the fact 
that I'd misspelled the name of a global and used the correctly spelled name 
in the references to it. All I need is the first error message to clue me in 
to the problem.

7b) "It gives this obnoxious box to click in."

	What's the alternative? Insert the messages into the source file? Write the 
messages into a separate file? The first clutters my source file, the second 
takes longer to deal with than simply reading the message, then pressing 
"Return" or "Enter" to dismiss the box.

7c) "The messages aren't too useful."

	You already said this.

7d) "It doesn't show you exactly where the error is."

	The cursor gets placed at the beginning of the offending line, and between 
the error message, the cursor placement, the source context, and a little 
parenthesis-matching, I have no problem finding the error.

	I do not expect the C compiler to bottle-feed me. C doesn't work that way. 

"Admittedly, I don't know the alternatives."

	You should try them. After you have tried them, you may find that LightspeedC 
is infinitely easier and quicker to work with.

"Also, what I've been trying to do is to take a UNIX/MSDOS program (GnuChess) 
and get it to run on the Macintosh. This is probably not what lightspeed was 
meant for. "

	This is correct. LightspeedC is not a Unix C compiler that happens to be 
running on the Macintosh; it is a C compiler that's useful for writing 
Macintosh applications, drivers, and desk accessories in C. The Unix libraries 
are there, but they're simplistic, and shouldn't be used for writing 
Unix-style applications to run on the Macintosh. The Macintosh isn't a Unix 
machine, and no amount of library support is going to make it one.

"I don't at all regret making the jump into the 20th century and buying a 
Mac ][. I do regret wasting the $95 bucks on LightSpeed C."

	As a Macintosh enthusast I admire your choice of computer. As an enthusiastic 
Lightspeed Pascal and LightspeedC user, I admire your choice of language 
environment. As I said previously, after trying the alternatives, you may find 
LightspeedC to be your C compiler of choice on the Macintosh.

"Michael Lee Gleicher"
"Duke University"

		--Rich

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Richard Siegel
THINK Technologies, QA Technician (on leave)
Carnegie-Mellon University, Confused Physics Major
Arpa: rs4u@andrew.cmu.edu
UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,sun}!andrew.cmu.edu!rs4u
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